Other Teen Prodigies to Coco Gauff: ‘Don’t Read Everything About You’

WIMBLEDON, England — Whatever happens in the second week of Wimbledon, Coco Gauff already has made a huge impact less than four months after turning 15.

“No matter how she does the rest of the way, she’s already won our hearts,” said Chris Evert, an 18-time Grand Slam singles champion.

Evert won a few hearts of her own when, at the age of 16, she reached the semifinals of the 1971 United States Open in her first Grand Slam tournament. She generated front-page stories and international buzz as the youngest semifinalist of the Open era, even if Grand Slam tournaments were not as career defining then as they are now.

Like Gauff, who has reached Monday’s fourth round while playing all of her main-draw matches on one of Wimbledon’s two biggest show courts, Evert was a regular on center court in her debut at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, where the U.S. Open was played until 1978.

“The crowd went wild,” Sports Illustrated wrote. “Tennis fans are not supposed to go wild.”

Sounds familiar. But that was undoubtedly a different era, where it was easier to manage the flow of information and the situation. An era when Evert, unlike Gauff, did not have a screen full of potential distractions within such easy reach.

“It was a big deal, there were big headlines every day, but that was really all we had,” Evert said. “There was no social media, not the amount of press people and attention from all over the globe. It was just a different world.”

Evert was still an amateur then and a student at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. She did not have an agent, relying on her father and coach, Jimmy, to handle business and media requests.